Although I've never met Abigail, I'm pretty sure I speak for him (and most others) when I say we have not been similarly lucky. I remember nearly being fired when pointing out the deficiencies in a given design.

I don't know whether it is "luck", but I have succesfully rejected specificiations. It was almost 6 years ago, and I had just switched from the release management department to the technology department. For my second project, I had to implement "two-way replication", together with my cow-orker Mark. Mark and I had just finished a course about replication, and we didn't have much experience yet. The spec was written by Ruijin, a very capable programmer with years of replication experience, and our CTO. Ruijin decided to leave the company, which is why I had to do her work of implementing the spec.

But in stead of sheeplessly implementing the spec (which would not have been hard as the spec was clearly written) I decided to first study the problem, the constraints and the spec. After a week I had not only a couple of testcases that showed the spec would result in data corruption, I also had a correct (but a far more complicated) way of solving the problem. I consulted Mark and another cow-orker and they agreed with me. I went to the CTO, and told him that I thought the spec was wrong, and that there was a different way of solving it. He pointed to the whiteboard and told me to explain my case. I did, and afterwards, the CTO asked Mark if he agreed with me. After Mark answered positively, the CTO gave me the go ahead and I could implement my solution.

Abigail